A system can be used for multiple tasks. An example may be that of looking up a technical reference manual which has a web interface to solve multiple problems at hand. The user, in such a case and many other cases, does not specify the specific task at hand for which he or she is using the system. An example can include the scenario of a reference portal for server system administration, wherein the system administrators have multiple problems to be solved at any given point of time. They perform various actions on the portal to solve these problems, and switch between problems very often.
To assess the effectiveness of using the system, one can advantageously do analytics on the usage logs to understand what features in the system were used more and what sequences of steps were done to effectively solve a problem. To do any meaningful analysis, one would process the logs to arrive at task-specific logs. However, the existing approaches do not overcome these issues.
Challenges of log segregation include, for example, that the logs are intertwined. Different people can work at the same time, and/or each person can work on multiple tasks at the same time. Also, no user gives explicit indication of the task associated with each of his or her actions. Additionally, in many instances, including service delivery, there is an “open tasks repository” where one can get the list of open tasks against a person at any given point of time. And as stated above, task specific logs are required to do meaningful analyses. Existing approaches, however, do not include task specific log analysis or segregating intertwined logs.
Further, existing approaches do not include deriving information about the user activity from logs even if there is no explicit indication of the task associated with each action so as to improve user experience by automatically changing the user interface, and/or provide suggestions to the user based on the current task being performed.